Gig Reviews | Interviews | Music News

As It Is share video for ‘The Reaper’

It’s come just in time for Halloween and we’re obsessed already.

Brighton four-piece As It Is have released a horror-inspired video for their latest single The Reaper, off their recently released new record The Great Depression. The video also features an appearance by Underoath’s Aaron Gillespie as the reaper, the singer lent his vocals for the bridge of this skin-crawling track.

Guitarist Ben Langford-Biss says that the video reflects the conceptual thread on their latest album, The Great Depression. “The Reaper is the moment in the record’s narrative where The Poet becomes so desensitised to the concept of death, that death appears and manifests before him, offering an ‘escape’ – not in a malicious way, but as a means of release from the pain The Poet is feeling,” says Ben. “It was one of the most crucial and challenging moments in the narrative, and it was the last one that came together – lyrically and musically.

“To confer these themes of turmoil and conflict, the sort of inner claustrophobia The Poet is experiencing, we wanted the video to be gritty and dark,” he adds. “We ended up taking visual influence from some of our favourite horror movies and TV series, and our director Zak Pinchin really clicked with what we were trying to get across.”

“The video shows each of us waking up trapped in rooms, each room representing one of the four stages of grief that the record is chaptered into; denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance. Each of us faces off with death in some respect, whether that be in a literal or metaphysical sense, and there is an external antagonist controlling the events in the rooms – forcing us to face our fears, our grief, or even ourselves. We were super excited that Aaron Gillespie was able to be a part of the video, to play the part of this puppeteer and antagonist. Both the song and the video are so different to anything we’ve done before, and we’re so fortunate that our fans have embraced the darker and heavier side of our band and our constant desire to progress in new directions.”

The band are currently headed off to Japan for a handful of shows before returning to the UK in time for their headline tour, where we can’t wait to hear The Reaper live!

Here are those As It Is live dates:
25 November – Thekla, Bristol
26 November – Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh
28 November – O2 Ritz, Manchester
29 November – O2 Institute, Birmingham
1 December – O2 Forum Kentish Town, London